The US and its allies planned fresh sanctions against Iran over its unprecedented attack on Israel, seeking to dissuade Israel from a major escalation.
While Saturday night's attack caused no deaths and little damage thanks to the air defenses and countermeasures of Israel and its allies, it has increased fears that violence rooted in the six-month-old Gaza war is spreading.
The US is planning to impose new sanctions targeting Iran's missile and drone program in the coming days and expects its allies will be following suit, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement on Tuesday.
“These new sanctions and other measures will continue a steady drumbeat of pressure to contain and degrade Iran’s military capacity and effectiveness and confront the full range of its problematic behaviors,” Sullivan said.
Earlier, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US would use sanctions, and work with allies, to keep disrupting Iran's "malign and destabilizing activity."
She told a news conference in Washington all options to disrupt Iran's "terrorist financing" were on the table, and she expected further sanctions against Iran to be announced soon.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, speaking in Brussels after an emergency video conference of EU foreign ministers, said some member states had asked for sanctions against Iran to be expanded and that the bloc's diplomatic service would begin working on the proposal.
Borrell said the proposal would expand a sanctions regime that seeks to curb the supply of Iranian drones to Russia so that it would also include the provision of missiles and could also cover deliveries to Iranian proxies in the Middle East.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said he was "leading a diplomatic attack", writing to 32 countries to ask them to place sanctions on Iran's missile program and follow Washington in proscribing its dominant military force, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a terrorist group.
Iran launched the attack in retaliation for an airstrike on its embassy compound in Damascus on April 1 attributed to Israel, but has signaled that it now deems the matter closed.
President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the weekend that the United States, Israel's main protector, would not participate in an Israeli counter-strike.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told Netanyahu in a call on Tuesday that escalation in the Middle East was in nobody's interest and would only worsen insecurity in the region, so it was "a moment for calm heads to prevail," Sunak's office said.
